Waiting in the airport, among sleek furniture and a gabble of voices, I feel as if I will be travelling, and all the comfort and prettiness of this well-meaning country will soon fall away, and I will be home again on Hung Voung Boulevard among bicycles and the markets of my family. To feel my mother’s fine shoulders in my arms again, and sip beer with my father beside the Sai Gon River. My father: “Ahh see, our lovely city,” he has said many times.

Out in the grey air, an aeroplane is falling, coming down through brittle layers, puncturing the fog of cloud, dropping toward the raw land. A small light throbs under its wing. It growls along the earth, and a voice tells us what we already know. I stand well back in the little lounge, away from the doors. We watch the tunnel and how people begin to flow out into this other life. Perhaps they will come.

“Here!” someone shouts. Another runs forward, arms huge with bags. “Andrew!” “We didn’t know you’d expect us!” Squeals and hugs, and luggage left where it’s dropped. “Baby!” Woo-hoo!” “How you’ve grown!” The room fills with other people’s loved ones. “Truong!”

An old couple emerge. The woman is rugged up, and her hair is tied back, and it is my mother. I wave. She frowns about the room, sees me, waves and turns. Beside her is a small man. He wears thick glasses. She speaks to him, he looks up. I stare at the fragile old man she has brought, at what has happened to him, at what they have done to my father. They come forward.

“Manh! Here!”

I wade to them, this old couple. Their faces are the faces of my childhood and my parents. “Mother!” I feel her strong little body. So familiar. We are crying, and she hangs to me as if I have lifted her from the sea.

“Manh. So good, my son.”

“I prayed you’d come.” I feel her warmth in all the clothing she wears, her trembling. “Mother.”

“Manh.” I turn. My father is nearly bald. He stares, eyes pinched against tears. We embrace, and expecting the great size of him, I am stunned by his small bones. I squeeze him to me, feel the pressure of his own hands. Then we step back, holding each other. In his face, beneath layers of sinking flesh, is my father. The eyes of my father, that he has looked through since before I was a baby. “Father. Thank you for coming.”

He blinks, puts. “You are here, son. My eldest… son.” He looks away, taking control.

“I almost lost hope of seeing you.”

He stares, smiles. Perhaps he won’t speak of his ordeal. “And I of you.”

“I am sorry about Van.”

My mother cries, leaning against my fragile father. He pats her head, stares out through the crowd. In my homeland, one does not cry in public.

“We have all suffered,” he says.

“I am so sorry they arrested you again.”

“Mmm.”

“I hope to make you happy in this country. I have a place for you to stay.”

“Thank you, Manh,” says my mother.

“A house?” asks my father.

“A flat. Not very big, I’m afraid.”

He narrows his eyes. It is a silence I recall.

“I have been saving.”

“Of course.”

He looks around for his bag, lifts it to his shoulder.

“Let me carry that.”

“It’s alright.” He frowns. “Our luggage to collect.”

We go, this family of ours, across the absurdly polished plaza. Only my mother is speaking. I brush against my father’s arms, feel the knock of him. Our steps echo. In corners voices grow small, emptying, leaving. A light flickers in a shop. “Do you need a toilet?”

“No,” he says.

Perhaps it is I who must escape to a toilet. Sit and rock and cry. Sit for hours hoping to find them gone, their aeroplane not yet here. We turn into the luggage room, cross its soft carpet. I would like to lie face-down in this carpet, sink into the earth. Become dust.

“Those three,” says my father. I muscle the cases free and drag them to a trolley. Only two fit. I find another trolley, knocking into pillars and chains in an effort just to cross the room. They have brought all of their life here. The cases lurch and pull me in circles. A great mass of belongings. They have kept everything.

Out into the loud city. “This car?” asks my father when I stop at my boot.

“I’ll let you in.”

“What year?”

“Twelve years old.”

He nods, his face blank. Before the Regime, he always drove a new car. Now he has mine. “Does it perform well?”

“Sometimes.”

“Hmm.”

I strap them in. My father sits at the front, his old suit crumpling about him. I remember this suit, how well it fitted him. Perhaps it never did. “Good mileage?”

“Not very.”

“Enough, Hoa,” my mother shuffles forward behind him. “Why must you criticise Manh, when we have just got our beloved son back?”

“I did not criticise.”

“Really? You think he is stupid. That he can’t read between your lines?”

My father gazes out the window, gathers himself in. Mother wriggles forward in her seat, prods his shoulder. “You should be grateful to see your son again.” “I am.” He twists to her face. “Don’t talk nonsense.” “Nonsense! Ha!” And she begins again the scolding and prodding I have known all my life, thrusting words into all his secret places, while he jerks and groans and curses, at war with his urge to strike her. As if nothing has happened since last I sat at home in the midst of their arguing. I hear her niggling, and it seems as if she is prising words from him, the way you slap a torpid person to wake them up. He growls, says something hard and she laughs. In the heart of this bickering, she is pleased. She twists back in her seat. “Ah, Hoa. You are a strange one.”

“No stranger than a mad woman.”

She snorts. Once more she has struck some life from her husband. A flinty kind of life; it will do. She smiles out the window. He scowls in his seat, the blood high in his cheeks. In the mirror I watch her smile; the face of an urchin who prefers a smack to silence. A sad smile.

“Mother, did you enjoy your flight?”

“Oh, yes. Except for this old goat going to the toilet every half hour. He must weigh five stone by now.”

My father seems to swallow mustard. I can almost taste it.

Going up the lift, he carries this face before him, reluctant to breathe. He knocks on the lift wall, testing it, as if he is an engineer come to condemn the building. I lead them along the landing of my old flat. “Hello!” she says, making what she thinks is a bow. “I’m Christy.”

My parents stare at the odd European. “This is Christy,” I say. “Er, my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Nguyen.”

“Chao,” she says, offering a hand. My father looks at her hand, takes it as if it is a summons.

“How do you do?”

“Great.”

They wait, becalmed by the girl in her bright, shredded clothes, noticing the swell of her belly, the way her hair has been chopped on one side. “Welcome,” she says.

“Thank you.”

Apart from the wideness in her eyes, a look of having stared into a gale, she seems well enough. She has promised not to cry. Not to touch or kiss. A breeze trembles the edges of her dress. I am tempted to wrap my arm around her, to carry her inside and unlatch the clothes from her lovely body; this girl who speaks whatever is in her mind. She pushes back the hair from her neck. “Well, see you around.”

“Yes.” We edge past. She touches my bottom.

Inside, my parents stand, alien, ghostly. They turn to me. “That girl?” asks my father.

“She is a friend.”

They stiffen, glance at each other.

“Her fiancé has recently died,” I say. “She is alone.”

“No family?”

“They are in another city.”

Their heads tilt a little.

“I help her sometimes. Little jobs. She is waiting to have the baby.”

“Tst.” My mother nods, her face pinched with concern. “We must help her.”

“Yes.”

My father is studying the room.

“Please inspect your room. I’ll bring up the cases.”

“No hurry.”

When I return, my father is shuffling near the windows, bending to see the sun, searching the sky for mountains. He frowns and nods, making serious calculations, finding serious fault. I stand beside him, this little man who is my big father, waiting to speak, to hear him say my name and smile and say “yes”. He narrows his eyes, his lips clenched in thought. His brow is crossed as if blades were drawn over his face. He is bent forward, like someone listening, but still there is power in the meat of his forearms, his thick neck. I have known all my life this strength of his arms, even his slap. Arms that have carried me. I have hung from his neck, said funny things as a child must to draw from their father a smile. “Not a pretty view, father,” I say.

He pouts. “Hardly important.”

“Of course.”

He turns to me, pointing to the sun. “This flat is north-facing. Not north-west. You see?”

“I know.”

“Oh? Then you know it is the wrong ‘xiang’ for our family. It is out of line with the cosmic breath. You know this!” He shouts up into my numb face. “And I am a water sign. Yet where is the water? I saw no river or lake near here!”

“We could visit one.”

He squints as if there is dirt on my face. In the bedroom, my mother is sighing. “This flat is useless, Manh!” He looks about the sparse room. “You have forgotten who you are. You have become too shallow. Too European.” He pushes past me to the kitchen, picks up a glass. I stand in the mud of my hurt, too heavy to move, watching this man who is my father busy himself, the hill of his back to me, hearing the wind brood around our windows, the whine of it. It is a soft wind, empty of intent. My father drinks, and I want at once to offer him champagne, the best I have, but to break the bottles across his head. “You stupid boy,” he would say, falling. But this is my flat, and I must live here, as I have survived the silence and ghosts and indifference of this country. Making a life from wreckage. A stupid boy who has rescued his family. Given us life.

“Not so stupid,” I say.

He stares over his glasses. “What?”

I come to the counter. “With respect, father, you must be patient. We will move if it is important to you, but you must know it will take time and money. There is nothing that can be done quickly. You taught me that. Now you have to learn it.”

He stares, the old anger and blame waiting to come into his face, to surge and rouse him. He stares into his glass, drops it into the sink. He comes past me and sinks into a chair by the window, his breath like the tide of wind. I watch the side of his face, how the light makes soft his cheek, his skin the pale colour of urine. Only a few strips of hair cling to his skull. Such lank hair, weeping from his head. I watch the squeeze of his eyes, how they shrink into his sockets, and I recall how they have always been like this, that the Regime did not do this to him but the others long before. Fathers and fathers. A line of sad men, teaching their sons pain. I stand behind him, want to touch his shoulder. Vessels have broken in his ears, bled and died. There are splotches on his skull. “You will be alright, father,” I say.

He looks up, stares through his failing flesh, his lips pressed against fear. I lie one finger on his shoulder. He turns to study the view, the north-facing view. His breath is shallow in his outgrown shirt.

“Forgive my words,” I say.

He jerks his head, almost looks up. “Only words,” he tells the room.

“Some beer?” I say.

He turns. “Tiger?”

I move towards the kitchen. “Nearly as good.”

I find the bottle, pour a small glass for his small hands, place it beside him. We sip. A line of foam lies along his lip. I say nothing.

In my homeland, we respect one flower called the lotus. It is a flower we say is full of goodness, and a man who is like the lotus is called “quant a” – a good man. But what we admire with this flower is that it grows in muck. From the bottom of the mud comes beauty. It is always like this, in my homeland.

***

(University of Canberra Short Story Comp. Winner 1999);